Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist. He is known for developing optical character recognition (OCR), a reading machine for the blind and electronic music synthesizers, and since 2012 he has worked on artificial intelligence research at Google.
In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, he predicted that technology advances exponentially and that the singularity, when artificial intelligence surpasses the intelligence of all humanity, will arrive around 2045. This prediction also gave rise to the term “2045 problem” in Japan. He published a sequel in 2024. He is also considered a leading figure of transhumanism.
